The Prize

The Prize is a historical romance by the American writer Brenda Joyce, published in 2004. It is the fourth book of her deWarenne Dynasty sequence.

Devlin O'Neill is an infamous captain in the British Royal Navy whose life is organised around destroying the man who brutally murdered his father. He has brought the Earl of Eastleigh close to financial ruin and is waiting to deliver the final blow, and the earl's niece hands him the means to do it.

Virginia Hughes was born and raised on a tobacco plantation and is determined to rebuild Sweet Briar, the family place. She sails to England on her own to persuade her uncle to lend her the money for the work, and instead of a loan she gets kidnapped by Devlin O'Neill, who means to use her against her uncle.

Taken as his hostage, she finds her carefully laid plans giving way to something she had not planned on, and the novel follows the two of them through what her arrival does to his revenge. The deWarenne Dynasty books stretch across several periods and follow different generations of the same family, and this one belongs to the Regency part of that sequence.